I've written a whole bunch of perl modules, and I have to admit that I find some of the syntax cumbersome. There are two things I'd like to see new syntactic sugar for:
a) quickly accessing members in a hash reference
b) implicit first argument to method calls
c) let methods look like data within the object

Let me explain by way of an example:

sub somemethod {
  my($self, $v1, $v2) = @_;
  my($x1) = $self->{'key1'};
  my($x2) = $self->{'key2'};

  print "x1=$x1, x2=$x2\n";
  my($ret) = $self->_othermethod($v1);
  ...
[download]

Instead, I would love to be able to say:

method somemethod {
  my($v1, $v2) = @_;
  
  print "x1=$self.x1, x2=$self.x2\n";
  my($ret) = $self._othermethod($v1);
  ...
[download]

• Because it's a "method" instead of "sub" it's code automatically looks like "sub X { my($self) = shift; ..."
• $self.x1 is the same as "$self->{'x1'}"
• $self._othermethod($v1) means that "$self._othermethod" is a coderef to _othermethod, and the call is made with the same lookup rules as "$self->_othermethod($v1)"

I realize parts of this have been discussed many times before. Is this *way* too hard to do? Is it just stupid?

I think if there could be a safe presumption that objects will be hash references, and that "->{'...'}" should be condensed to one unshifted keystroke such as "." we'd all be much much happier :)

Edit: chipmunk 2001-05-08

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